Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Singularity University will bring students together from around the world to study subjects like nanotechnology, biotechnology, human enhancements and artificial intelligence to see how the technologies can work together.

Noble copy. The actual point is to study, possibly inflect, and likely accelerate our hand off of human hegemony to the machines. The uncomfortable truth that Kurzweil and the Singulirsity folks know is that all of civilization past and current is just the larval singularity, our inevitable and accelerating arc toward the post human future. And the chrysalis is about to open. Course you can't say that in lay company without getting dismissed as Hollywood-handicapped or science fiction addled. Yet.

The Singularity is sometimes referred to as the "geek rapture," which is apt, as it represents a kind of millennial threshold for the tech-obsessed. But despite all of the engineering and technology grinding its way in the direction of machine intelligence and autonomy, nothing close to a consensus has emerged regarding what the situation will look like when the machine actually wakes up.

It is worth worrying about, or at least wondering, why it remains impossible to see even the rough outlines of what is supposedly getting so close.